Only 1 in 46 nonprofit websites earns a good Experience Score.
That’s the headline from the first report of the Nonprofit Speed Index, a project we’ve been building at Gas Mark 8 for the last couple of months. We tested 4,121 nonprofit homepages across all 50 states. Just 90 scored 90 or higher.
I expected the numbers to be rough. I didn’t expect them to be this rough.
So let’s dig into what we found, why it matters, and what you can actually do about it if your organization is on the list.
Why we built this
I’ve been a fan of Joel Goodman’s SpeedyU for a long time. It tests higher education websites and ranks them side by side, so you get an honest, apples-to-apples comparison instead of a vague sense that your site is “probably fine.”
We work mostly with nonprofits and organizations in healthcare and education. Seeing SpeedyU made me wonder why nothing like it existed for nonprofits. So I reached out to Joel to make sure he was OK with us using his work as inspiration, and then started building.
The Nonprofit Speed Index is the result. Every organization gets a public profile with its scores and practical guidance its team or developer can use to start making improvements. We’ll publish a report every month on the trends we’re seeing.
How the scoring works
We use Google Lighthouse, the same free testing tool built into Chrome, to test each organization’s homepage. Every test runs under simulated mobile conditions, and every site is retested on a rolling 30-day cycle.
Lighthouse gives you four scores: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO. Our rankings focus on the first two. The Experience Score is 70% mobile Performance and 30% automated Accessibility.
We combine them using a weighted geometric mean instead of a simple average. That sounds like math-class homework, but the effect is simple: a weak score pulls you down more than a strong score can lift you up. A site can’t hide a terrible accessibility score behind a fast page, or the other way around. And any site scoring below 50 on automated accessibility is ranked below everyone else, no matter how fast it is.
Two honest caveats before we get to the numbers.
First, the mobile test is intentionally tough. Lighthouse simulates a mid-range phone on a slow connection, so real visitors on good Wi-Fi will usually see a faster page than our numbers suggest. But plenty of your visitors aren’t on good Wi-Fi. They’re in a parking lot, on a bus, or on an older phone with a cracked screen. That’s who this test is built for.
Second, automated accessibility checks only catch some problems. A perfect score doesn’t mean a site works for everyone. It means it passed the things a machine can check. Think of it as a smoke detector, not a building inspection.
The big picture
Here’s what the September 20 report shows:
- Median mobile Performance: 54 out of 100. Roughly 4 in 10 sites score below 50.
- Median Accessibility: 89 out of 100. Better, but not as good as it looks. More on that below.
- Median Experience Score: 62. Most sites land in the Needs Improvement range: 3,146 sites, or 76.3%.
- Poor experience: 21.5%. 885 sites scored below 50.
- Only 53 sites scored 90+ in both Performance and Accessibility. That’s 1.3%.
The distribution in our infographic tells the story better than any single number. There’s a big hump in the low 60s, a long red tail stretching toward zero, and a thin green sliver at the top.
The 12-second homepage
If you only take one number away from this post, make it this one.
The median nonprofit homepage in our index takes about 12 seconds for its main content to appear on a simulated mobile connection. That’s the metric Google calls Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): basically, how long until the big thing at the top of the page, usually a hero image or headline, actually shows up.
Google’s standard for a good LCP is 2.5 seconds. Fewer than 2% of the sites we tested meet it. About 60% take longer than 10 seconds.
Yes, our test conditions are tough. But even if you cut those numbers in half for real-world visitors, you’re still asking a potential donor to stare at a mostly blank screen for several seconds. Some will wait. A lot won’t.
Think about who’s visiting a nonprofit homepage on their phone. Someone who saw your post and wants to donate. A volunteer checking the time for Saturday’s event. Someone looking for help, maybe on a limited data plan, maybe on a bad day. Every one of those people is better served by a page that shows up quickly.
Page weight is the usual suspect
So why are so many sites this slow? In a lot of cases, it’s simple. The pages are heavy.
The median homepage in our index weighs about 4 MB. That’s the total size of everything a phone has to download to show the page: images, video, fonts, scripts, all of it. 668 sites are heavier than 10 MB. 103 are heavier than 25 MB. The heaviest one we found was over 130 MB, which is more than some phone apps.
The gap between the best and worst sites is striking. Sites with a Good Experience Score have a median page weight of about half a megabyte, with main content appearing in around 2.3 seconds. Sites with a Poor score weigh in at about 6.8 MB, over 12 times heavier, and their main content takes around 18 seconds.
Weight isn’t the only factor. Heavy scripts, slow hosting and poorly configured plugins all play a part. But in our data, heavier pages consistently score worse. From the sites we build and fix, I can tell you where that weight usually comes from:
- Uncompressed images. A 5 MB photo straight off someone’s camera, uploaded to the homepage and scaled down with code. The visitor still downloads all 5 MB.
- Background videos and sliders. They look great in the design review. On a phone, they’re often the single heaviest thing on the page, and many visitors never see past the first slide anyway.
- Third-party scripts. Chat widgets, social feeds, donation pop-ups, multiple analytics tools, a tracking pixel from a campaign that ended two years ago. Each one adds weight and delays.
- Plugin pileup. On WordPress especially, every plugin you’ve ever tried can leave scripts and styles loading on every page, whether or not the page uses them.
None of these are exotic problems. They build up over time as different people add things to a site and nobody’s job is to take things away.
Accessibility looks better than it is
On paper, accessibility is the good news. The median score is 89, and nearly half of all sites score 90 or higher.
But look closer. Only about 200 of the sites we tested had zero automated accessibility errors. The typical site has three. These are issues like images without alt text, buttons with no label, text that doesn’t contrast enough with its background, or form fields a screen reader can’t identify.
Three errors might not sound like much. But if one of them is the donate button, a screen reader user may not be able to give you money. That’s the kind of detail an overall score of 89 can hide.
And remember, these are only the problems a machine can find. Keyboard navigation, clear link text, sensible heading structure and whether your forms actually make sense to someone using assistive technology still need a real person to test.
It’s not your cause area
I assumed some kinds of nonprofits would do much better than others. They don’t.
The median Experience Score across our cause categories runs from 59.8 for arts, culture and humanities organizations to 64.8 for public and societal benefit organizations. That’s a five-point spread. Human services, health, education, environment and animals, religion: they all land in roughly the same place.
Arts organizations do have the heaviest homepages, with a median of about 4.8 MB. That makes sense. They’re visual organizations, and their websites lean on big photography and video. Health organizations had the highest share of Good scores at 3.4%, but even that is a small group.
The takeaway is that this isn’t a problem with one corner of the nonprofit world. It’s how nonprofit websites are built, maintained and budgeted for across the board.
What does this mean for your nonprofit?
Here’s the good news. Most of what drags these scores down is fixable, and a lot of it doesn’t require a redesign.
Start by looking up your profile. If your organization is in the index, your profile shows your scores and specific guidance on where to start. If you’re not listed, you can submit your site. If we’ve put you in the wrong category, you can send a correction from your profile.
Look at your homepage on your own phone. Not on the office Wi-Fi. Turn Wi-Fi off, use cellular data and load your site like a donor would. It’s a humbling exercise, and it’ll tell you more than any report.
Go after the heavy stuff first. Compress and resize images before they’re uploaded. Question whether that background video or five-slide carousel is earning its spot. Audit the third-party scripts and plugins you’re loading and remove the ones nobody can explain.
Fix the accessibility errors you know about. Automated errors are the low-hanging fruit because the tool tells you exactly what’s wrong and where. Alt text, button labels and color contrast are usually quick fixes.
Make it someone’s job. The sites that score well usually aren’t lucky. Someone is paying attention. That could be a staff member, a volunteer or your web partner, but somebody should look at performance a few times a year, not just at launch.
Better scores are nice. But the actual payoff is a better experience for the people you’re trying to reach: donors, volunteers, and people looking for help.
A note on how it was built
This project also started as an experiment in what I could build with AI coding tools. The goal was a fully featured site that’s fast, accessible and easy to use, which would be pretty awkward to get wrong on a site about exactly those things. There’s some interesting work behind the scenes, and I’ll write about it separately.
What’s next
We’ll publish a new report every month, so we can track whether things are getting better, worse or staying flat. Retesting on a 30-day cycle means organizations that make improvements will see them reflected in their scores.
With the framework in place, we’re also planning country-specific versions. Canada is on the list, and especially the UK, where we do a lot of our work.
If a few nonprofits make their sites faster and easier to use because of this, that’s a win. And if your organization is looking at its score and wondering where to start, we’re happy to talk it through.
